I found this to be a very insightful and interesting book. It basically took much of my thinking and applied it to a much broader scale. I have always been fascinated by the mixing and matching of different concepts, and this covers as many areas as the music I listen to, to the philosophical concepts that I espouse.
While much of it is just hilarious and awful (in a good way), I’ve always loved mashup songs, especially when they mash up metal songs with pop songs, if only because these things are so disparate that you would never predict their working together.
Similarly, and more seriously, I have also emphasized the importance of reading widely in philosophy, pulling ideas from seemingly different philosophical disciplines. Like combining phenomenology with philosophy of science and other more abstract kinds of philosophy.
And even beyond philosophy, I have also recognized the importance of reading widely in many different topics, from biology, to psychology, to history, to economics, to political science, to philosophy, and relying on insights from all to formulate my own worldview.
This book simply distilled this idea in a beautiful fashion.
The Medici Effect is a term coined to refer to the generation of new ideas by combining concepts from different cultures and disciplines. He demonstrates that by doing this, you not only create the possibility of exponentially more ideas, but you are creating ones that are more likely to be ground breaking. As such, this is basically a case for diversity of all kinds.
The book was written in the early 2000s, and the book exploded after that, so much of what it talks about is already becoming common place in businesses and in fields of study. But, in many ways, Johansson is the guy that helped bring this change in the first place. Perhaps controversially, I think this book is the reason for diversity hires. Johansson makes the case for why having diversity of cultures at your business is actually more important than expertise. Even better is that I have never seen people reference this book to justify the notion, but this book’s popularity makes it impossible to deny that it is the source.
I think many of the examples that Johansson provided were interesting. And they range from recreational to important. For example: he cites the card game Magic: The Gathering as one example. This game combined collectibles with card games, allowing for an entirely novel (and addictive) idea that paved the way for many other games down the road (like Pokémon).
Another more ground breaking example was a man trying to solve the issue of truckers trying to navigate the optimal passages in the mountains. This problem was seemingly intractable because of the calculation problems; quite simply, there were too many possibilities to sift through. But then he talked to a man who studied the behavior of ants. When that man explained to him how ants communicate and find the closest food sources, he realized he could use this to solve the problem. Ants randomly send scouts out to search and when the ants the find food sources, they give off pheromones that attract the other ants. The closest one is always detected first. This solution to the problem was applied to routing in telecommunications, with virtual pheromones used to direct signals through the closest routers. And this was how the trucker problem was solved; by relying on this kind of communication.
Johansson gives many more examples, but these are two instructive ones.
Johansson also makes the point that when you step into the intersection and start generating ideas, it is important to note that failure is part of the process. If you are going to innovate, you must take risks and accept that many of these risks will fail. He even cites research showing that great innovators produced many more ideas than they are known for. For example, Einstein produced countless papers that went nowhere and are never cited; Mozart only has a fraction of his works played today. The intersection produces many ideas, and many of them will not pan out.
Johansson cites four different strategies for stepping into the intersection and producing new ideas: exposure to different cultures, learning differently (outside of institutions), reversing assumptions (identifying assumptions and thinking about if they are reversed), and adopting different perspectives on identical situations. I think these are rather straightforward.
Similar to what I mentioned above, Johansson also talks about risk aversion, citing Kahneman’s research on prospect theory. This is the idea that losses loom larger than gains in our minds. People are more likely to take risks to avoid a loss, than to make an identical gain. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what is needed to be successful. You should takes risks when you are out ahead, and play it safe when you are behind. In order to do this, Johansson suggests that you reframe how you think about your actions. First, admit that you can and will fail. Second, what are your goals? Depending on how you define them, you will perceive similar actions as risky or not so. For example, if the goal is to learn for learnings sake, then jumping around from one project to the next, where many fail, is not necessarily risky, given that you are always learning. This is functionally a psychological trick to avoid the biases that prospect theory describes.
Another random point that sticks with me is risk homeostasis. This is the idea that people have a certain level of risk that they naturally tend towards, suggesting that many attempts to make things safer, might not actually have that effect. For example, making people wear seat belts will make them drive more recklessly, enough so that the mandate doesn’t actually decrease the prevalence of accidents. And this is a well-supported effect that is verified in all walks of life.
Overall, I found the book to be an interesting and fun read.
StateoftheNihil 